FPC Dallas

What does love actually look like in real life? In this sermon from 1 Peter, love is not described as a feeling, but as a posture. Something lived out in the body. Something that stretches us beyond instinct, comfort, and convenience. Drawing from the early church, this message explores a kind of love that does not come naturally. A love that reaches toward others without shared history, obligation, or guarantee of return. A love that must be chosen again and again. This is not easy love. It is stretched-out love. Love that exposes us, costs us, and calls us to remain open even when it would be easier to withdraw. Part of the Eccentrics: Keeping It Real After Easter series.

What does it mean to have joy that does not depend on circumstances? This sermon explores a kind of joy that exists before proof, one that holds even in uncertainty and struggle. Drawing from 1 Peter, it invites us to consider how resurrection reshapes not just what we believe, but how we endure. Part of the Eccentrics: Keeping It Real After Easter series.

Easter begins in the dark, with people carrying spices toward a sealed tomb. The women in Mark’s Gospel are not certain, not hopeful, and not prepared for what they will find. They are simply walking. Along the way, they ask a question they cannot answer: who will roll away the stone? It hangs in the air, unresolved. And still, they keep going. This sermon explores the kind of faith that does not rely on clarity, certainty, or control. A faith that looks, from the outside, like poor planning. A faith that keeps moving even when the outcome is unclear. When the women finally look up, the stone has already been rolled away. The revelation was not something they created or solved. It was something they encountered. Easter is not only about what happened at the tomb. It is about the ongoing act of lifting our gaze, of seeing again, and of recognizing that new life is already unfolding, often before we are ready to perceive it.

Good Friday confronts us with a different kind of violence. Not only the machinery of empire, but the quieter, more familiar force of anonymity. In Mark’s Gospel, the cross is surrounded by a crowd described only as “they.” No names. No responsibility. Just a chorus of passing voices. This sermon explores what happens when suffering becomes spectacle. When humiliation is carried out not by a single villain, but by a diffuse, indifferent crowd. The ones passing by have somewhere else to be. Their mockery costs them nothing. And yet, it is exactly this casual distance that allows the cross to happen. Against this backdrop, one figure is named. Simon of Cyrene. A passerby who is pulled into the story, forced to carry what he did not choose. In a moment shaped by anonymity, he becomes visible. Good Friday does not ask whether you would have volunteered for the cross. It asks something smaller, and harder. When you find yourself near someone else’s suffering, will you disappear into the crowd, or will you remain? You are not a they. You are known.

The journey through gravity and grace comes to its final movement here. After gravity, affliction, attention, de-creation, and obedience, we arrive at what has been present all along: grace. Grace is not something we achieve at the end of the journey. It is what meets us in every stage, even when we are unfinished, uncertain, or resistant. It is not a reward for getting it right, but a reality that precedes us. This sermon reflects on what it means to receive grace rather than strive for it. To recognize that even under the pull of gravity, even in our unmaking, we were never outside its reach. Grace does not wait for completion. It meets us exactly where we are.

After de-creation, something new must take shape. This sermon turns to obedience not as rule-following, but as a lived response to grace. In the Gravity and Grace series, obedience emerges after the self has been loosened from control and illusion. It is not forced compliance, but a form of listening that becomes action. A way of living that reflects trust rather than certainty. Obedience asks us to move without fully knowing, to respond without securing the outcome, and to follow where grace leads rather than where control feels safest. This is not about perfection. It is about posture. Learning to live in response to something greater than ourselves.

After naming gravity, affliction, and attention, this sermon explores what happens when the self begins to loosen its grip on the world it has constructed. Drawing on Simone Weil’s theology, de-creation is not destruction for its own sake, it is the undoing of illusion, control, and self-centered narratives that keep us from reality. We spend much of our lives building a world that makes sense to us, one where we are at the center and everything confirms what we already believe. But grace does not reinforce that world. It dismantles it. De-creation is the slow, often painful process of releasing our need to control, explain, and secure ourselves. It is what makes room for truth, for others, and ultimately for God. Before we can be remade, something in us must be unmade.

After descending through gravity and affliction, the journey toward grace begins with attention. Drawing on Simone Weil’s insight that attention is the rarest form of generosity, this sermon explores how easily we replace true listening with explanation, advice, or quick solutions. In Mark’s Gospel, when the crowd tries to silence Bartimaeus, Jesus does something different—he stands still and asks a question. Attention leaves the space open long enough for another person to speak.

Not all suffering is the same. In this sermon from Mark 5, we explore the difference between pain and affliction. Pain scars the surface. Affliction burns underground, severing the roots that connect us to community, voice, and belonging. As part of the Gravity & Grace series, this message reflects on the woman who hemorrhaged for twelve years and the synagogue leader, Jairus. One comes from the front with a voice intact. The other reaches from behind, nearly erased by isolation. Affliction is not merely physical suffering, it is what happens when the soul begins to believe it is alone, invisible, or even complicit in its own pain. In the midst of urgency and interruption, Jesus stops. He creates space for the invisible to become visible again. And he completes the miracle not only by healing her body, but by restoring her name: “Daughter.” The affliction is suffered alone. The un-affliction always happens in public.

In Scripture, the sea is never neutral. It represents chaos, fear, and the forces that pull everything downward. In Mark 5, Jesus crosses the water to meet a man living among the tombs, bound by affliction and abandoned to gravity. This opening sermon in the Gravity & Grace series explores what Simone Weil called the “natural movement of the soul”: fear descends, water always falls, and we often prefer familiar suffering to unfamiliar grace. Gravity is not malicious, it is simply the law. But grace interrupts. When Jesus restores the man to himself, he does not invite him into the boat. He sends him home to tell what mercy has done. The miracle is not only that he was healed, it is that he returned. Grace does not always pull us toward safety. Sometimes it sends us back into the places least likely to understand us, armed only with a story of mercy.

Ash Wednesday begins with a descent. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is named “Beloved” at his baptism and immediately driven into the wilderness. This sermon explores what that movement means, not as punishment or “tough love,” but as a return to dust, to humanity, and to grace. In a culture that avoids limitation and fears weakness, this message invites us to see the wilderness differently: not as breaking, but as reuniting. Not as exile, but as homecoming. In the wilderness of dust, God does sacred, recreating work. As we begin Lent, we are reminded that grace is not found in our rising, but in our descent.

Rev. Amos Disasa closes out our series on Christian friendship

Rev. Dr. Charlene Jin Lee preaches as we continues our series on friendship

Pastor Amos continues our series on friendship with 'Righteous Speech'

Rev. Amos Disasa begins a new sermon series on friendship

Jessie Light-Wells preaches on Epiphany Sunday

Amos preaches from Matthew 2 on the first Sunday after Christmas

Pastor Amos preaches the Christmas Eve sermon that he's not allowed to preach on Christmas Eve

Rev. Dr. Charlene Jin Lee preaches on the third Sunday of Advent

Pastor Amos preaches on the second week of Advent